http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
IT'S difficult to underestimate the noxious effect popular culture has
on our children, but sometimes it's easy to tell when something is horribly
wrong.

In a Fargo, North Dakota elementary school, a fourth-grader was
observed drawing a scene of unimaginable horrors: death by drowning, death
by explosions, death by crushing, death by impalement, etc. He cheerfully
admitted he got the idea from a movie --- a film shown in prime-time with no
warnings. Here's the frightening part: no disciplinary action was taken. No
counselors were called. The parents weren't even notified.

Why? Because it was the mid-sixties, that's why. The fourth-grader was
your author, and he was drawing a picture of the Titanic sinking, complete
with a sea of stick figures in peril, exploding boilers, etc. "A Night To
Remember," which was the Titanic movie before "Titanic," had been on the
previous weekend. No one thought the drawing was particularly horrible --
aside from its manifest aesthetic deficiencies -- because this was what
little boys often did. Give them a stick, and they'll draw a line in the
sand. Give them a carrot, and it's a pistol barrel. Give them paper and
pencil, and vast armies perish, if only in pictoral fashion.

Boys will be boys. And that's the problem.

In West Monroe, LA, a boy has been disciplined for drawing a gun. Not
"drawing" in the old High-Noon slap-leather sense, either; he put pencil to
paper, probably stuck out his tongue to indicate concentration, and drew a
soldier with a gun. Of course he was punished; why should we be surprised?
In the recent stories of expulsions and suspensions, it's part of a natural
sequence. In January a Jonesboro, Ark. child was suspended for pointing a
chicken leg as a gun. (Fried chicken perhaps - cooked in Smith & Wesson
oil!) In March two boys in Irvington, N.J. were charged with "terroristic
threats" because they waved paper guns. Now a drawing lands you in the
principal's office. It'll be okay to draw the Washington Monument - even
though he was a slaveowner - but don't point it at anyonel lest you violate
the zero tolerance policy on sharp obelisks.

The disciplined gun-drawer showed other worrisome symptoms: he drew a GI
in full camo, a tribute to a relative in the service. And the kid had drawn
a fort, stockpiled with weaponry - including typical little-boy flourishes
like "5,000 knives." Said the school principal, Edward Davis: "It had hand
grenades, knives and guns. We have zero tolerance for drawings with guns. We
can't tolerate anything that has to do with guns or knives."

It would be interesting to eavesdrop on their history lesson. "And then
came the Civil War. The class from the North met the class from the South
and they were very mad at each other. And what do we do when we're mad at
someone?"

"We turn a frown into a hug," the class responds like a chorale of bored
robots.

"That's right!" says Teacher. "And the hug was called ŚReconstruction.'"
So much for the 19th century. Let's move along to the 60s, the crucible of
the Anti Bad-Thoughts Movement, and learn the best kind of flower to stick
in the barrel of a National Guardsman's rifle. Except we don't call them
rifles; they're owie-poles.

At some point, education requires facing unpleasant realities: there
were, at several key junctures of human development, guns. And knives and
bombers and gas ovens and gigantic mushroom clouds over dense population
areas. This isn't to say that fourth graders need their faces ground in the
misery of human perfidity; nor should schools turn a blind eye to young
twitchy loners-in-training. But "zero-tolerance" rules demonize inert
objects so school administrators can have an easy response, uniformly
applied. Doesn't matter if it criminalizes gestures. Doesn't matter if it
has the effect of stigmatizing the very nature of bumptuous boyhood - in the
eyes of a increasingly feminized culture, that's something that needs
stifling, anyway.

Cultures that teach their children soldiers are bad are eventually
forced to confront cultures with bad soldiers. Oh, you naughty Red Chinese
soldiers swarming into Taiwan - you've earned a time out! You didn't say
please and you all have guns.

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